


Where Two or Three May Gather

by Dragcoin



Category: Children of Time Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Alien Technology, Aliens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragcoin/pseuds/Dragcoin
Summary: The crew of the exploration ship Solfarer stumble across a unusual radio transmission.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Where Two or Three May Gather

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



The ship was called the Solfarer, through the star after with it had been named it had never visited. It was a long and bulky affair, bulbous projections where the various instruments and measuring devices sat in their compartments. An exploratory vessel, it’s automated systems scanned the vacuum in front of it as it decelerated towards its final destination. 

One of these subsystems, a forward looking radio telescope, was peering into the dark ahead of the drive plume, cataloging the strange star the vessel had come to document. A routine duty the subsystem never wavered in or tired of doing, continuing to do so as it had been doing for the last 67 years of flight. 

Until now, that is. 

If the telescope subsystem could speak, what it now observed would have prompted it to say: 

What in the blazes is that!

-

Avar woke up with a pounding headache. 

“If I knew that I would wake up with this I wouldn’t have taken the assignment,” she groaned. 

She sat up in the medical bay, still shivering from the aftermath of the cryogenic freeze that had gotten her flung out here, almost 50 light-years from Asbat. 

She looked at her terminal at her side. The portids were already up, she noticed. Their sensor specialist, the portiid Bianca, was already on the bridge, along with one of the two other portiids on their five person crew, Portia, the captain. The other portiid on the crew, the male mechanic Fabian, was down in the computer core. 

Which brought her to the only remaining human on the crew, the medic Jess. 

Jess looked her over, checking for any abnormalities in the waking process that could have damaged body functions. 

“Why have we been woken up,” Avar asked. 

“Beats me. Computer detected an anomaly in-system apparently. No idea what is going on. Captain was on it as soon as she thawed.” Jess replied. “Wouldn’t let anyone else look at the data, whatever it is.”

Jess finished her examination. “She called a crew meeting to address whatever this is. So I guess we better find out what’s what.” 

“I guess so,” Avar replied, rising to head to the bridge. 

-

“Greetings,” Portia said via the translation device all portid members of the crew carried with themselves. All five members of the Solfarer’s crew were gathered in the bridge. 

“You are probably wondering why we have been thawed a week before our scheduled time.” Portia gestured toward the other portid that had been on the bridge with her. 

Bianca scurried forwards from her position and stated calmly and without a hint of excitement that such monstrous news was, “Around a day ago a sensor detected radio waves emanating from in-system.” 

Jess suppressed a speak of excitement, and Avar found herself almost slack-jawed in awe. Radio waves! And this particular system had not been colonized by any Old-Empire humans. That meant... 

“We believe that these radio waves are probably extra-Terran in origin,” the portid concluded. 

Avar found herself giddy with excitement. True aliens! Not any of the various uplifted species that traced their descendants to Earth and the Rus-Califi virus. Honest to god aliens! And she would be the first biologist to study them! 

“Could it be a mistake,” Fabian asked, the male portiid cringing under the sudden attention of the two other portiid females. “I mean, it is best to be sure, in a case like this.” 

“Yes, we must be sure of this before we report it back. Which is why we are going in to investigate,” said Portia. 

-

Avar had always hated waiting. 

She spent the interning two weeks of the Solfarer’s final deceleration burn pouring over the radio signal received from the system. It had been detected on one of the smaller planets in the system, one tidally locked to its star. 

The signal itself was incomprehensible. Bianca, as their sensor specialist, had tried to make any sense of it, but confessed that it was beyond her abilities. The signal was in a language or code that none of Solfarer’s crew could crack. 

“I have tried nearly every thing that I have trained for,” she confessed to Avar. “Nothing seems to connect or work. I mean, all known intelligent life up to this point originated from Earth, via the Rus-Cailif virus or Earth evolution. Who’s to say that whatever these things are that they utilize some weirdly exotic language processing?” 

“Well,” Avar said, looking at the advancing planet they were hurdling towards a stop to. “I guess we will find out ourselves in a few days.” 

-

The shuttle departed the Solfarer with Portia, Fabian, and Avar on it, descending toward the brilliant divided marble of the planet below. Over the past few days, the telescopes had been able to pick out the exact spot the radio signal was emanating from: a set of ruins on the dividing line between the day-side and night-side of the planet. 

Avar tried not to get excited as the shuttle rumbled on its way down to the planet’s surface. Aliens! Probably not live ones; they had detected no heat signatures, no activity since they had parked in orbit a day earlier. But there could be bodies, or other natural organisms that they brought with them. Just the artitecture alone could provide them with much to go off of. 

The shuttle set down with a thump, and the three children of Earth set foot on another’s world. 

The ruined buildings were low and squat, like a crouching portid about to spring. They resembled blocks of dark stone more than anything else, as if some god had decided to scatter his play toys on an alien plain. Avar and the two portids set off into the ruins, cataloging the decaying halls. 

“See the openings in the buildings,” Avar said over comms. “There’s no doors or anything to keep the atmosphere out. They breathed this stuff. Or at least, they weren’t bothered by it.” 

The three continued their search, winding through the complex, nearing the central and largest structure. 

“Would you look at that,” Fabian said. 

The central structure was the tallest structure in the complex, twice the height of the others. The base of the complex was all open except for the supports at the corners, suggesting to Avar that it was a place were a large amount of whatever these aliens were gathered. 

Avar started to go into the building. The ceiling in this structure was not the low affair that the other buildings had. It was vaulted and rose above her in a sweeping arc. 

“Wow,” she breathed, making her way into the center of the room. “Do you guys-“ 

Suddenly the floor gave way beneath her, the centuries old tiles giving up their war with gravity with the addition of Avar’s weight. She plunged down. 

Avar shrieked and remembered just in time to cover the faceplate of her suit to prevent it from being damaged just as she hit the bottom. 

“Avar! Avar are you alright!” Portia was saying through the comm. 

Avar felt a pain in her leg and looked down. Her right leg was twisted at an odd angle, and hurt to move. “Think that I broke my leg,” she said back. 

“Alright, try not to move. We’re going to try and get you out and back up to Jess,” the portiid captain said. 

“Alright, I’ll hold tight-“ 

Avar’s voice cut off as she looked up in wonder at the scene illuminated by her headlamps. 

The room she had fallen into was vast, almost as big as the building above. But what took her breath away was the intricate mosaic on the ceiling. 

Every building that the three had come across on their way into the ancient complex had had no adornments; no pictures, art, or designs. Just plain rocky walls. This building was different in that the ceiling had a large pictographs on it. The design was clearly of intelligent design, Avar thought to herself. It consisted of a multitude of lines connecting variously, seemingly randomly placed dots. 

“Avar you two-legged genius!” a voice said through the comms. Bianca. “You figured it out.” 

“I did? What did I figure out? What’s going on?” Avar asked. 

“The radio signal. It’s not a message; it’s a map.“ 

-

Jess came down with the other shuttle and managed to retrieve Avar with some help from the others. She had been exasperated at Avar’s lack of care (“Don’t you look where you are going in an alien ruin!”) but had fixed Avar’s leg up to heal. 

Bianca spent days pouring over the pictures of the mosaic and the radio message, transcribing them into a local star map. 

“Look,” she had said through the transcriber when she visited Avar in the med bay. “I have figured out where this planet is on the map. Best of all, as much as I can figure it out, the radio message is an invitation.” 

One of the portiid’s legs shot out and traced a line from one dot on the picture to another about halfway across it. 

“There. That’s the star that the message is saying to go to.” 

Avar sat up in the bed. “We are going there?” 

Bianca gave a little shimmy of portiid excitement. “Portia already punched it in the navigation system and broadcast our findings out. In a few centuries every Earth derived species is going to be crawling over this place.” 

Avar felt a grin coming on. “But not us.” 

“Nope,” Bianca replied. “We are heading to that star.” She tapped the star at the center of the mosaic picture that she had indicated earlier. “Wonder what we will find there. Live aliens? Another ruin? A long lost alien empire?” 

Avar grinned openly. “I don’t know what we will find. But I do know this: I for one certainly can’t wait to find out.”


End file.
